tiistai 21. huhtikuuta 2015

After
the 9/11 attacks, international investigations were launched into
financial transactions that seemed to indicate foreknowledge about
the coming catastrophe.1
For its part,
a technology firm named Convar, located in
Pirmasens, Germany, had been tasked by the U.S. Department of Defense
to restore data on damaged hard drives gathered from the ruins of the
destroyed WTC skyscrapers. These investigations stemmed from
suspicious and untracked transactions – up to 100 million dollars –
carried out using WTC computers right before the attack, pointing
to foreknowledge of the total destruction of the evidence.

In what follows it will be demonstrated that Convar's investigations were followed and reported by global media in 2001–2002, and that in 2003 the FBI denied that they had ever been carried out. Pliantly, the media became silent about the investigations, and the 9/11 Commission did not mention them at all in its report.

Media Reports about the Investigations

Reuters2,
CNN3,
Der Spiegel4
and others reported about the progress of this computer forensics5
investigation.

In the Reuters article, FBI was named as
a client. Convar's director Peter Henschel is quoted as saying that

”the
companies in the United States were working together with the FBI to
piece together what happened Sept 11 and that he was confident the
destination of the dubious transactions would one day be tracked
down.”

News coverage continued into 2002. Four
months after the disaster, Germany's TV channel ProSieben
visited Convar's laboratory6
and documented the process of restoring data from one WTC hard drive.

In March 2002, Germany's ZDF
(Zweite Deutsche Fernsehen) in their ”Heute Journal” program
visited Convar's laboratory, interviewing the employees and
documenting the examination of WTC hard drives.7
It was reported that, by then, the company had already succeeded in
restoring data from over 400 hard drives and that the drives had been
sent by the U.S. Department of Defense (”Verteidigungsministerium”).

According to an article in German
technology magazine Techfieber, the hard drives were sent from
the USA to Ramstein, Germany, and from there in a special transport
to Pirmasens.8
The article notes that, on average, about 400 hard drives are
processed in the laboratory every month.

A German press portal notes that by
September 2002, the company had been provided 1,250 hard drives from
WTC, with the assignment ”restore all data that can be restored”.9
(”Dies soll nun die deutsche Firma Convar mit Sitz in Pirmasens
verhindern, ihr liegen 1250 Festplatten aus dem World Trade Center
vor. Der Auftrag der amerikanischen Ämter lautet: retten, was zu
retten ist.”)

On September 11, 2002, German radio
aired a program in which their team visited Convar's laboratory and
interviewed the company's employees.10
The team understood that the employees were not allowed to mention
Convar's U.S. partners, but they noted that the U.S. Department of
Defense was marked as the sender of a hard drive shipment they saw.

The FBI's Denial

Fast forward to 2003, when the 9/11
Commission had a briefing about the 9/11 insider trading
investigations with the FBI. The members of the Commission asked the
FBI, perhaps somewhat leadingly, about

”persistent
press reports that a [sic] certain damaged hard-drives had been recovered
from the WTC site and sent to Germany, where a company was working to
restore them. These press reports contend that large volumes of
suspicious transactions flowed through computers housed in the WTC on
the morning of 9/11 as part of some illicit but ill-defined effort to
profit from the attacks”.11

In its briefing memorandum, the
Commission states that the

”assembled
[FBI] agents expressed no knowledge of the reported hard-drive
recovery effort or the alleged scheme. Moreover, one of the New York
agents pointed out, from personal experience, that everything at the
WTC was pulverized to near power [sic], making it extremely unlikely that
any hard-drives survived to the extent they [sic] data be recovered.”

Based on the FBI's statement, in its
final report published in 2004, the Commission did not mention
Convar's widely publicized WTC hard drive investigations. The topic
was also never again addressed officially, and it was dropped from
mainstream media reporting.

However, in September 10, 2006, the
Dutch investigative program Zembla resurrected the issue by
interviewing Convar's spokesperson, who replied that the company
cannot give any further information but made ”creatively”
clear that it sticks with its earlier reports. One of Convar's early press reports,
from February 14, 2002, notes:

”In
mid-November, CONVAR Deutschland started work on the recovery of data
from hard disks from the World Trade Center and neighbouring
buildings. The use of the latest techniques, the long experience of
the German specialists and the high security standards of the Data
Recovery Center in Germany led many US companies and state
institutions to decide to entrust CONVAR with the recovery of
sensitive data. (see. SAT1 video - On the Traces of 11th September /
Galileo – FBI Investigators Waiting for Data)”12

According to the CNN article, some
other companies were also involved in the WTC hard drive data
recovery effort.13
I contacted via email the author of the article, Rick Pereira,
who was unable to recall – due to the long time that had elapsed
since his reporting – what these other companies were.

Convar is not shy about its WTC hard
drive restoration assignment – see the introduction video on
the company's main page.14
The U.S. Department of Defense is stated as the client of the
operation here.15

Later Developments Contradicting the Commission's Conclusions

The
9/11 Commission famously stated that ”Ultimately the question [of
who financed the 9/11 attacks] is of little practical significance”
and that the financial transactions, suspicious on their face, had
innocent explanations. The Commission also determined that their

”investigation
has uncovered no credible evidence that any person in the United
States gave the hijackers substantial financial assistance.
Similarly, we have seen no evidence that any foreign government –
or foreign government official – supplied any funding.”16

In 2015, several congressmen have
supported resolution HR 428 by representatives Walter Jones and
Stephen Lynch, which upon passing would obligate President Obama to
declassify the 28 redacted pages in the congressional 9/11 report
from 2002. Congressmen who have been allowed to read the censored
pages have testified that the pages describe the participation of
”specific foreign governments” in the attacks. In particular,
leaks from the censored pages concern financial and other support
by Saudi government officials living in the United States to the
alleged hijackers.17

Also
contrary to the 9/11 Commission's conclusions, several more recent
academic analyses have confirmed the original suspicions of trading
with foreknowledge of the attacks. In 2006, California University
Press published a peer-reviewed analysis by Allen Poteshman,
Professor of Economics at Illinois University, about the put options
placed on United and American Airlines. The study concludes that
there is ”evidence of unusual option market activity in the days
leading up to September 11 that is consistent with investors trading
on advance knowledge of the attacks”.18

In January 2010, a group of Swiss
economics experts published a study19
concluding that some investors had advance knowledge of the attacks
in at least 13 stock trades, and in April of the same year an
international group of economics experts demonstrated that just
before the 9/11 attacks there was a spike in trade volume deviating
from long-term trading volume, leading the researchers to conclude
that some investors were acting on inside information about the
coming catastrophic events.20

In
line with the ”forgotten” Convar investigations, these research
results have not even been discussed in mainstream media, let alone
inspired any well-funded or well-publicized investigative journalism.

Former
Senator Bob Graham told IBTimes that, based on his involvement in
the 9/11 investigation and on the classified information in the
document that his committee produced, he is convinced that “the
Saudi government without question was supporting the hijackers who
lived in San Diego…. You can't have 19 people living in the United
States for, in some cases, almost two years, taking flight lessons
and other preparations, without someone paying for it. But I think
it goes much broader than that. The agencies from CIA and FBI have
suppressed that information so American people don't have the
facts.”